Bluesky Might End Up Defeating Twitter Once and for All
The app has the edge where X once dominated: news and live events.
I just hope federal services (like applying for a passport) don't become Twitter-only after Trump appoints Elon as Secretary of Enshittification.
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I've made a huge mistake breaking my personal rule to avoid all political content and I've regretted that immediately
4 years if laws and constitution stay the same and are followed.. first term he had people alienated into him who were at least slightly appropriated for their positions, this time people who has nothing to do with their positions are being appointed simply for being loyal to him... Let's see if any of them won't let him do anything drastic within 4 YEARS
It’s more than 4 years. We just crawled out of Trump inflation and now are going right back in.
Dismantling and breaking is easy. They can do a lot of that in 4 yrs. Building takes decades.
There’s also a global effect. Would Putin have ever attacked Ukraine without a Trump term? How about Israel’s taking self defense into genocide territory?
America leads by example and the last example was an impulsive 3 yo with a giant military force and a dead diplomacy department in the executive branch. There’s permissiveness in that.
Nah, most people are going to live their lives and see absolutely no effect from anything done. No single administration has the ability to totally fuck up the country in the amount of time they have. That's why you get the big swings back and forth between the two parties. Also, the news is very good at sensationalizing absolutely everything and making you think that, oh my god, it's the end of the fucking world. What are we going to do? Run around like chickens screaming with our heads cut off and shit.
You mean head of DOGE? Because we live in the timeline where a terminally online edgelord with the brain of a 14yo and the body of a 54yo makes meme government agencies.
Anyway, get your passport now. They're good for ten years, enough to last at least through the tentative end of Trump's circus.
The new online passport process is unbelievably good
They better not ruin it
oh yah i just renewed using the new process, got my passport back in less than 2 weeks.
Narrator: they ruined it
Ooh, thanks for the reminder! Mine expires next year. Best renew it now before they fuck that up, too.
Just tell all your friends to do a passport. It will be ready if shit hits the fan and they must leave the country.
The fact that this is an actual possibility is absolutely hilarious.
Mastodon
Bsky federates. I follow several people from my Mastodon profile.
Edit: I should add a caveat here. Federation doesn't work as smoothly as Threads yet. You have to use a bridge service: https://fed.brid.gy/
Not only federates but can also be partially self-hosted and is also open-source - by the way, I don't mean it's perfect but a lot better to reach people from there than Twitter, but be wary of this), anyone knowledgeable of US politics will know the names mentioned and how shady it looks. I still think Mastodon isn't ready for this kins of exodus. People who waited this long to leave either wants convenience or is waiting for some of the people they follow go elsewhere, or both. Mastodon has too many mobile apps options, BlueSky official app is so much closer to how Twitter looks like and people are used to and don't need to choosee instance as it already comes pre-selected by default (although people can change). Then comes the issue of scability if there was an instance to be the "default" for these people who just want quick and convenient alternative, will it be able to handle this much people at once? I have no idea but I doubt it. Most of us who go find alternative in the Fediverse is aware privacy-focused alternatives usually more than often comes at the price of convenience, not really the mindset those people are in, hopefully some of them get into it by learning what decentralization is from BlueSky?
Has an aggressively unpleasant user base and nowhere near the blocking functionality that Bluesky has, which is essentially mandatory now for minorities on the internet. Not to mention an onboarding process that can confuse the tech literate, much less the average person.
This comment is not an invitation to talk about how actually it’s very simple and intuitive if you follow a 20 step process that relies on detailed knowledge of how federation works.
I think it's easy to understand Mastodon, or any federated service, using a metaphor for a country or large place, where you can say "I want to move to X country" but then you have to actually pick a place IN that country to live, like a specific city or rural district. Once you decide on your instance, it's really not that hard
You dont need to explain email so federation does not seem to be the issue here IMO. The problem is money which FLOSS projects usually don't have. The successful ones have perhaps enough so that the devs can put food on their table, but not much else. Most of the apps are after Dayjob hobby projects. It's hard to compete with those who have teams of paid staff.
Those people will either learn one day or they will end up in the same vicious cycle over and over again for the rest of their lives until they do learn the lesson or die. The only reason the blue sky process is better is because, at least currently, they only have the one server. If it ever actually federates, like it's supposed to, then that point is completely moot. Because then they won't know how to sign up for blue sky either.
Bummer that isn’t mastodon but any inconvenience to musk is appreciated
Actually not a bummer in my opinion, let people sort into different platforms based on their interests like we used to do with forums.
A fragmented internet is a better internet
I somewhat agree, but it's not going to happen. If Bluesky wins this battle, they're just going to be the dominant platform. It's not going to spread out. It's just going to migrate. A federated alternative would at least be spread out by design, though connected still.
that's not how the modern internet works and unfortunately i am forced to be on facebook because all 4 of my hobbies no longer exists outside of it.
if people moved to the fediverse instead of bluesky or such, then we'd actually be able to have a fragmented internet again - due to how the fediverse interconnects through federation.
which i think is the best selling point the fediverse have - no longer would users need to be on multiple services, they could just be on one, and still interact with the services across the fediverse. but unless there is a mass-migration of one single service to the fediverse, such as people choosing mastodon over bluesky, to be the dominant service - it's just never going to happen.
So, a Splinternet?
Why people cannot see that the core problem of twitter is not that it got bought by the asshole billionaire. It's that the asshole billionaire was able to buy it.
Wasn't he forced to do so after trying to back out, or am I either imagining that or thinking of someone else?
It's a little more complex than that. He, like, was buying shares, blew past the 5% ownership disclosure point, failed to disclose, was forced to disclose his stake. He was then offered a seat on the board, didn't like the lack of control, and made a meme offer on the remaining stake to take the company private, tried to pull out, and was forced to buy the company he didn't want to buy by the board of directors who didn't want him to buy it.
He's the recent Adam Conover interview with the details: https://youtu.be/sxG2Y3E0uEY
He also bought 9% of it and didn’t disclose it, IIRC that had something to do with it as well.
Surely that could never happen again though! /s
It should be Mastodon. This is the same shit with a different name
There was a good explanation about why not mastodon the other day. It basically boils down to Bluesky is just an easier transition.
Yeah, that's what I heard from my microblogging colleagues too. They tried Mastodon during the first wave of Twitter exodus, found it too frustrating/difficult, tried Bluesky and stuck with it ever since.
Mastodon is more of a protocol than a single service. It succeeds/fails on those terms, in the same way the old Web1.0 protocols did. Which is to say, you can't enshitify a thousand micro-sites at once like you can enshittify one big site that's under central control. But you also can't do things like navigate, search, and socialize efficiently.
Mastodon is successful in large part because it isn't. When you let a single cartel of corporate psychos run a Mastodon account like they would a Twitter or Facebook, you end up with Truth Social (literally just a Mastodon branch instance).
ActivityPub is the protocol though. Mastodon is an implementation of the protocol.
That's an interesting perspective. Do you think the same about lemmy? While also decentralized using the sameprotocol, it seems reasonably efficient to me. I'm from a small instance from my country, and the global content is easily available to me.
I just have a lot of trouble explaining how it works to people who aren't tech savy... this is what I consider the main issue withthe fediverse as a whole.
Very accurate
Bluesky is (in theory) federated, but I think you can't run your own server yet. We'll see if they keep their promise.
Its protocol has some improvements over ActivityPub, for example you can use a domain name you own as your username even if you're not hosting your own instance, and your user identity is portable in that case - you can move to a different instance but keep the same username.
They've followed through on their promises so far, and you can actually self-host pretty much the whole stack today:
https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q
I'd perfer for mastodon to take off personally, but really at this point both are good options and worlds better than twitter.
What's the difference, really? Aren't they both decentralized microblogging social networks?
BlueSky isn't decentralised yet. Right now the only thing that is decentralized is data storage. You can't set up an independent federated instance yet. They promise they will add that feature, but it hasn't happened yet.
I wish some entrepreneur had instead created an amazing fucking Mastodon instance and put all that marketing and engineering dollar into the platform. But you can’t own Mastodon so you can’t ever sell Mastodon so those types of folks will never invest in Mastodon. We could just say “fuck ‘em” but they have done a serious job of monopolizing the time of all the talented people who know how to make something like this go.
Let's replace one proprietary service with another. It looks so good with its API wide open, like it's never getting enshittified.
Bluesky is not proprietary, it's mit licensed and open source
Then please point me to an instance with less shitty privacy policy than this
Countdown until it turns out that everybody associated with any competition to Musk's companies just so happens to be a criminal Trump siccs his DOJ after: 5... 4...
I wouldn't discount the possibility that bsky is backed by the same dark money pool that bought twitter. putin found that it's way too easy to buy elections worldwide just using social media. They'll never give it up.
X will likely merge with TruthSocial as the defacto Conservative/Right-wing social media site (named something dumb like "XTruthXSocialX"), while BlueSky will become the defacto Liberal social media site.
That would be great - much better than the current situation where twitter is run like a right-wing site but still has people from across the political spectrum hanging out there due to inertia.
I suspect it will only because every single furry on YouTube seems to be trying to get the entire fandom to move from Twitter to BlueSky. You know we run the internet.
You know it!!
You people are the sewer mutants of the internet
Our group includes the Teenage Mutant Turtles, so you're not entirely wrong.
Cowabunga, dude!
Hey don't knock on the guys that keep the lights on.
These kind of articles always remind me whenever a new MMORPG launched, and then people claimed it would be the World of Warcraft killer.
On the other hand, the track record of old social networks is not great.
And it's reasonable to posit Twitter is deep into the enshitifiication cycle.
In truth, every subsequent mimic platform is smaller and more diluted.
Lol if I had a dollar for every time I've heard about the next CoD killer
I mean, plenty of other games have had way more concurrent players.
Maybe, but they're not MMO games.
99% of my Feed on Bluesky was just people saying they've left Twitter for Bluesky. No amount of suggest less of this helped.
happens on every "new" social media platform that is similar to another social media platform. Was all over Lemmy when people were "boycotting" reddit...course most went right back to reddit when the boycotting was over.
Tbf, were you on lemmy last summer?
Or on Reddit after everybody left Digg
Yeah thats how it was here after the reddit fiasco.
It has improved here though, thank Jeebus.
Haha there is a gigantic wave of people switching over from twitter right now, that's just what is on people's minds. The conversation will move on soon enough.
Just like when Threads launched and or when Reddit made the API changes. You get a flood of new users who want to talk about being new users.
Lemmy is just that but Linux and reddit users
On my feed it's just pictures of pets and people who I don't know making lists of things they like. But to be fair, I just installed the app today.
Ha ha ha, yeah, sure. Bluesky won't defeat xitter, at best it'll just be the "next thing" once xitter finally finishes getting rid of most of its users, which I guess will take more than 4 years from now.
The great thing about BlueSky is how under-the-radar its flown for the last few years. Virtually no advertising. No legions of bot accounts spamming with invites and generic attention baiting posts. No |>u33y N |3io blowing up my mentions. No enshittification, because its just a primitive clone of the original Bird Site.
The more popular it gets, the less likely that'll last. BlueSky won't defeat Twitter until it becomes Twitter.
My issue with BS is it took VC money from crypto bros.
What do we think will happen when they come looking for their returns on investment?
It’ll only defeat X if corporations and specifically media and sports entities start using it.
Good. Fuck Elon Musk and Twitter.
What's good exchanging one bad service for another bad service? Elon can just buy it.
Sigh, that was an eye-opening depresing read.. thanks for sharing!
What is TPOT
The author explains in the thread and has links to further info.
Twitter facilitated exactly what Elon set out to do with it.
It costs a lot to become vice president, especially if you weren't born in America
I've started removing trash sites. I blocked twatter and reddit at my router.
What's Bluesky?
It's the hot new non-billionaire controlled social media app for the 2020s: https://bsky.app/
not billionaire owned, but a bunch of VC firms led by one called Blockchain Capital already put a 15million USD bridle on them
Oh, ok.
Looking like it’s about time lmgtfy to make a comeback.
It needs A) same functionality B) ban all forms of racism, especially Zionism and C) refuse investment from undemocratic nations like GCC or China
Or USA 🤭 they just killed their democracy hard
They should definitely not allow investment from anyone associated with Trump admin, the Pentagon etc.
What's with the consistent amount of "American Democracy is dead" rhetoric I've been seeing lately? It's not like Trump is president yet. And sure, Biden isn't going to make too much impact as a lame duck, but even after Trump takes office again, there's a lot he can do, and a whole lot more he won't be able to. The power is still in the hands of the people, especially at the local level. America's democracy isn't dead, and saying anything of the sort is obeying in advance.
That’s not going to happen here. Am I the only one who watched Trumps speech claiming to be about 1A? He is coming for social media day 1, to reinforce Elon Musk, not only on Twitter, but all other large social media platforms (he doesn’t name FB and Reddit, but he’s talking about FB and Reddit, maybe as far down as Lemmy, BlueSky & Mastadon too, idk).
He says he’s going to mobilize “my Department of Justice” to do it.
He specifically says: making account removal/banning only possible via court order, removing moderation, and removing any labels of misinformation or disinformation.
He’s already threatening YouTube with removal of section 230, if they moderate content.
Why is no one talking about this?
yeah I don't think a usa based platform is really "long gaming" the fee speech problem. Bluesky now shifting to monetization plans. Its a matter of time until some rich dildo buys it up. If were lucky it will be mark cuban or somebody buts its still grim prospects.
"Fee speech" is a serendipitous typo. Or maybe you meant it. First I've heard it, anyway.
Cuban has deleted much of his anti trump talk, high odds the man is hunkering down.
Remember, trumps been promising vengeance to “enemies” for well over a year now, and now he has immunity from prosecution.
Agreed. It needs to be in a country like Switzerland or some such.
refuse investment from undemocratic nations like GCC or China
:-/
If I was being honest I'd add "literally anyone whos firm has any connections to a NATO government" but then I'd be called a consoiracy theorist. But as for GCC, that's a more direct threat to lives of dissidents.
Please, let's not do this. Lets just enjoy sites that aren't toxic without making them toxic by written articles with headlines like this.
Ehhh on bsky there are curated blocklist and you can mute words....and it actually works, like twitter before the takeover.
What you need to win the battle is to clone twitter before they changed the timeline to use the algorithm.
Tech journalists never learn anything from history. No Vc-funded social media is good
Most humans seem incapable of understanding why decentralization of power matters.
Some VC funded social media is certainly less fascist than other VC funded social media.
Given everything we've seen over theast little while, including the process of non-profits getting taken over by their VC funded subsidiaries; that difference you see is almost certainly a matter of being at a different point in their respective profit timelines.
Mastodon should revamp the project's website homepage and promote a mobile apps with the closest Twitter-like feel or maybe a page for it without giving too many options (so people trying to promote it would share the link and people who aren't familiar with federation not think its weird "non-official" websites promoting multiple apps), these people just want convenience and most are mobile users. I wish most would go to Mastodon but there are so many barries going from something quick and convenient like Twitter to something like a Fediverse social media, I think Pixelfed catches this issue better of looking closer to what people are used to (in their case, an alternative to Instagram) than Mastodon (alternative to Twitter)
The default iPhone app and sign-up process for the main instance is pretty darn straight-forward. I’ve never been a Twitter guy so I can’t speak to functionality, but it seems fine to me already.
And I'll be right there with Bluesky, it's so much better on every issue, significantly fewer bots, no ads, no premium version, and no AI
Soooooooo........what happens whenever X eventually dies? Does Bluesky just defederate, and say "Haha! It is I who has the most audience, therefore I who dictate the industry!"
Hot or not was a thing until friendster was a thing.
Friendster was a thing, until myspace was a thing.
Myspace was a thing until facebook was a thing.
We've seen this line of ups and downs before. Eventually Twitter will be replaced. And then the new thing will be around. As of right now, Bluesky is "federated", but it REALLY feels like they don't want to be. Drop of a hat, and they're defederated. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see it.
I want you to imagine signing up for a service that has extroplatratinated defubulinators. And everybody on the service is taking full advantage of it. But you haven't signed up yet, so your defubulinator needs to be created and calibrated before you can gain anything from it. Now imagine if you had no idea what extroplatratinated defubulinators even were, and you weren't being given any indication what they do, or how to use them. Imagine you had no idea what I was even talking about. And imagine what you would do if search engines wouldn't help you figure it out. But here I am, ranting and raving about how much better it is for you than traditional methods. But you couldn't find ANYONE who used it, or knew what I was talking about either.
So now you just keep living life. Never again taking what I said serious.
There was a time when people thought legally mandated interoperability could become the law of the land. That dream is probably dead, but if there's ever a chance to push it through, it would be worth doing. It'd be a complex piece of legislation to be sure and would probably need to go through a number of iterations to get it right, but it would be a start.
i donno about other social networks but my fedi posts from 15 years ago are still up.
The creators seem pretty passionate about the federated network aspect of it: https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3laujhn5lfs2p
That was the original project they signed up for after all.
and Google used to care about not being evil.
Corporations will ALWAYS enshittify a platform they control. It’s simply a matter of time.
The difference is businesses started using it to promote and customer care, even the President uses it. My Space never had that.
I'm totally fine with dealing with that issue when musk loses billions
I'm not sure it will, and I don't really want it to. Twitter is a shithole in part because of the userbase. If Twitter dies, the users will move to Bluesky and make that shitty too. I'm already seeing porn bots appearing in my feeds with as small a userbase as there is!
That's valid, luckily, Threads seems to be taking all the alt right extremists, Mastodon is taking all the programmers, and Bluesky is taking all the furries and LGBTQ
As long as it doesn't become Twitter I don't care if it beats it.
Twitter disappears when racism ends. Twitter will stay the cesspool it is.
Twitter dies when advertisers realize there's no money in paying to advertise there. The moment it becomes more advantageous to pay for the ads somewhere else, it collapses.
Both are terrible
Bluesky is a trap
Well, comparing to Twitter.. you can use their API, BlueSky is open-source and you can partially self-host. A lot better but you also could very likely be right about it being a trap.
With no safeguards the users won't know it's a trap until it's sprung.
Reddit was almost exactly the same, and that did very little to help anyone
Not best either
I wonder if the next president could do something to stop that… seems like the head of DOGE might like it (or not, if that means contrarians disappear and stop "community noting" his posts, and allow for a more echoey chamber)
🎼It's gonna be Blue~~~ Ski~es for you~ and I~ 🎶
I wouldn't get too excited. Humans as a whole aren't particularly smart and it only takes a small percentage of bad actors and super dipshits to spread misinformation like a cancer no matter what platform you're on.
Our species wasn't prepared for the internet. We should be adding courses to public education teaching how to separate fact from fiction and how to find and utilize reliable sources, but instead we gleefully elected a party that ran on deconstructing the public education system.
Oops.
Born free 🎵
Even if it did, Musk would just buy it.
it isn't necessarily for sale at the moment
Put enough zeros on the end of a check and it will be.
Even if it were for sale, it's designed to be decentralized so you couldn't buy the whole network, just like you can't buy all of Lemmy or Mastodon. That's the theory anyways - I don't think they've really executed on it yet.
Oh no, fascists won the election! Oh no, Musk is a fascist! We need to leave X! Where should we go? Mastodon? Too complicated! BS, which is financed by fascists? Count me in! 😭
im out of the loop. who are the faccists that financed bluesky?
They're probably referring to the fact it was founded by Jack Dorsey, who has since abandoned it because the other people in charge refused to let it be as bat-guano as he wanted.
Ironically, he left Twitter for the same reason. Bluesky was supposed to be his own version, in his image, and yet rational minds prevailed there at pretty much the same time Musk started pushing Twitter in the direction Dorsey had wanted all along.
